


cityscapes

by kathillards



Category: Power Rangers, Power Rangers Ninja Storm, Power Rangers Operation Overdrive
Genre: Gen, post once a ranger angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-25
Updated: 2018-08-25
Packaged: 2019-07-02 06:18:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,424
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15790704
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kathillards/pseuds/kathillards
Summary: Tori Hanson and five cities full of legacy in a world that, somehow, keeps turning.





	cityscapes

**Author's Note:**

  * For [hearden](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hearden/gifts).



> for ryan, thank you so much for everything! i had so many options of what to write you but this fic had been begging to be finished and i figured, you're tumblr user torihansons so it works right? sorry there's no romance :(

_new york city_

"Do you still talk to them?" she asks Kira, peering out the window of an apartment building in New York, out onto the crowded streets of a city that never sleeps, but maybe it should. "The boys, I mean."

"Yeah," Kira says with a shrug that indicates she isn't quite sure what a positive answer means. "We email and stuff. Sometimes call, but, you know. Timezones."

Tori lets the blinds fall shut with a clap. "Right," she agrees in the faraway tone of someone who knows all about the meaning placed behind a word like _timezones_. "It feels like so long ago, that we were - you know."

They don't speak of it, not here, not in a bustling apartment building with thin walls in the heart of New York City. Kira strums her guitar to cover the conversation, playing a semi-familiar song from the radio.

"Doesn't feel very long ago when we put those morphers on again, though, does it?" Kira smiles, warm, yellow. It strikes Tori how very deeply she associates Kira with yellow, even though her wardrobe consists mostly of blacks and greys lately.

She looks down at herself. White shirt. Blue jeans. Close enough. "It was fun," she agrees, rubbing her wrist where a morpher had been just a month ago. "Wouldn't trade it for the world."

"Who would?" Kira says, striking a chord on her guitar that echoes for hours. Tori sits down on the windowsill and waits for the music to fade - this note is soft, is fond, is wistful. Lingers in the air, twisting in her thoughts. Reminds her of a cafe in a city on the other coast, Kira up on stage, boys she used to know cheering in the audience, surrounding her—faces she had loved more than her own life.

"Being a power ranger," Kira continues, voice softening, music rising louder, covering their tracks, "I don't think it ever stops."

Tori's fingers still on her wrist, listening to her pulse pound where once there had been magic. "You think we'll always be superheroes?"

"I think," Kira says, slow and thoughtful, and lets the notes fade away, "I think we'll always know we can be."

-:-

_blue bay harbor_

Blue Bay Harbor is unfamiliar territory these days, new roads and new buildings winding the path to a waterfall she still sees in her dreams every now and then. It still smells like the sea and the forest, ocean mist and pine trees, warm earth and the dust of bike tracks in the air as she trundles her old truck through the town. The secret woods haven't changed, but she can't go there, not yet.

Her feet take her to the beach, watching the families sprawled out on the sand, the kids playing in the water. Some she recognizes, some she doesn't. The waves stay the same, the ocean as reliable as ever. She doesn't have her surfboard with her, not today, not for this journey, but she heads up to the water anyway, the waves lapping at her ankles as she goes.

The sun is setting, the crowds scattering, when a voice murmurs low behind her, "Missed home?"

She turns to see Cam, hands in his jacket pockets, half a smile hidden behind his glasses as he looks at her. "How'd you know I was here?" she asks, forgetting to go in for a hug. He doesn't seem to mind much, only stepping forward to be at her side as they watch the sun sink down over the city skyline across the distance.

"I have an app for that," he says, almost teasing, though his tone is dry as ever. She'd missed it, she realizes, had forgotten how to spot when he was actually being sarcastic and when he meant what he was saying in the time since she'd been gone. "I know when all of you come home. You may be ninjas, but that doesn't mean you get to sneak around when you're here."

"I wasn't trying to sneak around," she protests, wrapping her arms tighter around herself as the wind picks up. Cam snorts, but doesn't say anything. “What have you been up to?”

The conversation feels forced when it shouldn't, her smile stilted when it's _Cam_ , he's her best friend, she's his confidant, they would die for each other. But his arm brushes hers for a second, never quite as comfortable as they used to be, just a glimpse into an old life where she and him and all their friends would lie tangled together on the floor of their base laughing and throwing food at each other and making fun of whatever movie they were watching and get to be kids for a moment amongst the mess that was their lives.

"Not as much as you," he remarks, raising his eyebrows at her. "Overdrive, huh?"

Tori sighs, her insides tangling at the mention, the mere thought of putting on her suit again, of fighting alongside a new team. She doesn't know how it makes her feel even still, months later, whether it's guilt or excitement or apphrension or none of the above.

"They called, I answered."

"Was it fun?" He sounds a little longing, staring out into the sea. She wonders how often he dreams of the power, if he wakes up at night in a cold sweat, old monsters dying in his mind, if he imagines the rush, the adrenaline, the blood pumping through his veins every time he takes a breath.

She knows she does. "Yeah," she admits. "It was a lot of fun."

Cam nudges her in the arm as he turns to walk away. "Come by the academy some time, yeah? Your students miss you."

_I miss you._ He doesn't say it, though. Tori smiles and watches him leave, the grey of his coat dark against the backdrop of the sandy cliffs. Not green. She wonders if it's a time thing. Growing further away from your color.

Her jacket is blue, but it feels cold when she zips it up. She imagines water flowing between her fingers, threading across her skin, droplets in her hair, the way it used to feel. A shower was magic. Surfing was breathing.

Nowadays, she feels washed out. Like the best is behind her. Behind them. Cam disappears somewhere in the parking lot, nothing but a streak of green passing in the sunset. Her wrist feels heavy with phantom pressure, warmth, solid strength she used to be able to rely on.

-:-

_angel grove_

Angel Grove is three freeways away from home, but it’s evening when she steps onto Adam’s doorstep, feeling a little lost in a city so heavy with legacy. He opens the door, takes one look at her, and says he’ll make her hot chocolate.

“You make really good hot chocolate,” she murmurs, mostly to her cup. Adam smiles at her and sits down on the other stool at his kitchen island, the whole apartment feeling so big and empty, she thinks it might swallow the both of them whole.

“Kim taught me how,” he admits. He does this sometimes, just throws names out there like she’s supposed to know them. Maybe she is. Or maybe he keeps confusing her for another blonde girl he had known a long time ago.

It wouldn’t be the first time.

“How much do you miss them?” Tori asks. She wishes the hot chocolate had alcohol in it, so she would have an excuse for such a personal question, but Adam doesn’t seem to mind. He takes a moment to consider it, his expression growing wistful as she watches. He seems so old sometimes, not in the physical way but in the way that he’s seen and remembers so much. Like he has five lifetimes worth of memory compared to her one.

“It comes and goes,” he says finally. “Does that make me a terrible person?”

“That you don’t miss them sometimes?” Tori shakes her head. “I get that too. Like sometimes… all I’ll want is to hear Dustin laugh or see Shane skateboard and then other times… it’s like I can’t even remember them.”

“I have a theory,” Adam says, tracing a line in the granite countertop. “That it’s the Power’s way of protecting us. Like, if we remembered everything all the time—all the good and the bad and the terrible—if we missed it _all the time_ , it knows that we would do stupid things for it. So it represses them.”

He sounds like he’s talking from experience, so she has to ask: “What kind of stupid things?”

Adam smirks. “Like putting on a broken morpher and nearly killing yourself.”

That’s a story she hasn’t heard before. Tori has often found, with the other rangers, that silence is the best invitation, so she sits and waits for him to work up the nerve to talk about whatever it is he’s been holding inside him for so long. She knows what that’s like—the way something itches at you, something no one else would understand except for maybe someone you don’t even talk to anymore.

“My replacement, Carlos, he needed some help,” Adam says with a shake of his head. “Actually, he didn’t. He would’ve been fine. Had a whole team and—anyway. I went to help him. I felt… guilty, I guess. I gave him all that pressure and no preparation.”

“You were eighteen,” Tori points out gently. “It never should have been your responsibility.”

This, this platitude, it’s something she tells herself on the nights when she gets _mad_. When she curses Sensei Watanabe for knowing all along that they would be chosen to save the world and never doing shit to prepare them. For thrusting three children into battle barely-armed. When she looks at Cam and sees the weariness in his eyes from how hard he’s fought his own father to be the man he wanted to be—she tries not to nurture the hate, but it festers inside her anyway.

Who lets children save the world, anyway?

Adam bows his head over his own mug of hot chocolate, taking a long, deep breath. “It doesn’t matter. I tried to morph with the black power coin, and… well. At least I’m here, right?”

“Why didn’t you use Zeo?” she asks curiously. “Or Turbo?” Having never had more than one set of powers, Tori doesn’t think she can understand the switches, the way it makes you feel to go from one source of energy to another. How that must mess with your body, with your psyche.

Adam smiles bitterly at her. “I didn’t want to win. I just wanted to feel something again. And I succeeded.”

“Was it worth it?”

Adam curls his hands so tight around his mug, she worries he might break it. “No. It wasn’t.”

And that’s all there is to that, Tori thinks. It’s not worth it. It never was.

-:-

_briarwood_

On the days she feels moderately happy about it all, after a phone call with Blake or a text from Kira, she goes to Briarwood. The atmosphere of this town is always more lively, more magical, more electric than any of her other cities. Blue Bay Harbor feels dull and gray without everyone there; Angel Grove feels lost under the weight of its own legacy these days. And New York City is too much to even comprehend.

But Briarwood knows what it is, where it belongs, and to whom it belongs. Briarwood loves the Mystic Force rangers. It sets off an ache deep inside her, wishing for a slice of a world with no secret identities, where she never had to lie to her parents, where she might be able to fall in love again with someone who wasn’t there.

She’s not that person. When she stops by the Rock Porium to see Xander, she thinks that maybe despite all his pretenses, he’s not that person either.

“Hey, V, I’m going on break!” he calls when he sees Tori at the front door. “Can you take care of the shipments?”

“Don’t I always?” Vida quips, sticking her tongue out at him for abandoning her. Xander grins at her, easy and charming, and then grabs his jacket—it’s green, she notices—to go join Tori outside.

She doesn’t know how to say hello, really—she knows him, but she doesn’t _know_ him. Not the way his team knows him. So instead she asks, “Busy day in there?” like they’re two strangers on a blind date.

Xander looks at her carefully, his silence weighted. Trying to figure out why she’s here, maybe who she is. He doesn’t know either. He can’t, really. The Mystic Force rangers have been so isolated from everyone else, until him. He can’t understand the pressures of the legacy the way she and Kira and Adam do.

Can’t understand how it feels to look at the Overdrive rangers and be overwhelmed with guilt. They’re _kids_. They’re only kids. The Mystic Force rangers had been teenagers too, but they’d never thought it was odd. Had never known to ask, maybe.

“You seem like you have a question you want to ask me,” he tells her. Right on the money.

Tori shrugs, slipping her hands into her pockets. “I just wanted to see what it was like here. You and your team… you’re still close?”

“Of course.” Xander lifts his head, defiant. Maybe Adam or someone told him the stories—about the drifting, and the goodbyes, and how trying to keep a friendship going from the other side of the country is hard enough without the nightmares and the trauma that come with being an ex-ranger. “We’re all still here, anyway. Except Nick.”

“What happened to Nick?”

“Nothing.” Xander frowns and toes at a crack on the sidewalk. “He just has things to do. He’s a big deal around the forest, you know. The Light.”

Tori has no idea what that means, but she doesn’t question it. “He was red, right? And he’s… he was okay with you running off to help the Overdrive rangers?”

“Yes,” says Xander instantly, then falters. “I mean. Well. I didn’t exactly ask permission. Why?” The look he sends her is borderline worried, maybe a tiny bit guilty. “Do you think he’d be mad?”

“I don’t know him,” Tori points out, then sighs. “Shane hasn’t spoken to me in weeks.”

“Oh.” Xander stops in front of a tree that she thinks is a portal to his other word and sinks down to his knees. “Yeah, I get that. Maddie was pretty upset with me. Vida, too, but she gets over things faster.”

Tori stops next to him and looks up at the green, green leaves covering Briarwood’s blue-gray sky above her. “It’s not like they wouldn’t have done the same thing.”

“Of course not,” Xander agrees. “But maybe it hurts that they weren’t asked.”

Tori tries to think how she would feel if it was Dustin, or Hunter, or Blake asked to come back instead of her. If they’d come home from San Angeles overflowing with new memories, a new team, new laughter. If they’d been chosen to fight again—would she hold it against them?

“I don’t know why it was us,” she admits quietly.

“We did win,” Xander points out with small smile.

Tori doesn’t say anything. She hadn’t been talking about Sentinel Knight and the Overdrive rangers. She didn’t know why it was _them_ —her, Shane, Xander, Kira, Madison, Adam, Blake, everyone—instead of anyone else. Why they were chosen.

Then again, maybe he hadn’t been talking about that, either.

-:-

_san angeles_

She hates San Angeles. It itches at her like no other city does. It’s so damn sunny all the time. Humid and hot.

Every time she comes here, she misses the cool ocean breezes of Blue Bay Harbor, misses the grungy graffiti of Reefside, misses all the dents in the buildings that mark Angel Grove as haunted.

San Angeles is so shiny. So new. The Overdrive rangers have come and gone and barely anything has changed. Everything fixed up properly. The only history in this city is in the little things—the abandoned quarry just outside city limits, and the way some people jump at certain sounds. How the Hartford mansion sits like a looming ghost above the heart of the town.

She texts Dax and he tells her they’re out for pizza. Tori doesn’t want to go immediately, so she takes her time walking around the city till she ends up where they are, the six of them sitting around a table at an outdoor café, two slices of their pizza left on the plate in the center of their table.

They’re all laughing at something. Ronny says, “Shut _up_ ,” and shoves Will in the shoulders and he smirks at her and then reaches over to steal fries off Rose’s plate. Mack notices her first and looks up, his face brightening in a smile, one hand lifting in a wave.

Tori stares at them, frozen, rooted to the spot. Mack had died once, she remembers. Someone—Xander, maybe? Adam?—had relayed the story of their final battle to her. He had sacrificed himself for his team, been brought back by magic. And now look at them—sitting around, laughing, eating pizza. Like everything’s normal. Like it’s always been normal.

The crushing unfairness of it all threatens to suffocate her. She misses Shane and Dustin so much she wants to ninja streak back to Blue Bay Harbor and never let them go again. She wants to never see another team full of eighteen, nineteen, twenty-year-olds ever again. She wants to morph again. She wants to burn her morpher.

Ronny is next to her, suddenly. Super-speed, maybe. Or maybe Tori just hadn’t noticed.

“Is everything alright?”

Tori chokes on a laugh and presses a hand to her mouth. “I’m fine.”

“I don’t think you are,” says Ronny, sliding an arm around her. “Come on, sit with us. We have pizza. And, you know, alcohol. If you need it.”

They are unfailingly kind, these kids. She remembers that about them. Even when they’d given up, been defeated and dejected, they had been kind and good and strong.

She misses feeling that way. Misses knowing that she would do anything to save the world. She doesn’t know if she can, anymore. Doesn’t know why she was ever asked in the first place.

“Hey,” Rose says quietly when Tori sits down in between her and Ronny. “Do you want me to call someone?”

She has no idea what her face looks like. “I’ll be alright. I don’t want to bother the boys.”

“Uh, too late,” says Will with a shrug. “Adam’s on his way here.”

He puts his phone away and looks at her, serious for perhaps the first time she’s ever seen him. No reckless anger, no smug smirk. The kind of honesty she only gets from Adam when he’s halfway to being drunk.

“You know, we try to get together every few months. It’s good for us, I think. It’s good to have a team.”

“I have a team,” Tori says, and looks around the table. Sees Shane’s grin in Mack’s face, and Blake’s laughter in Dax, sees Dustin ruffling his hair as Tyzonn mirrors the same movement, sees the stubbornness of Hunter’s jaw set in Rose, sees Cam’s inquisitiveness in Will’s gaze. She looks at Ronny and sees, suddenly, Kira with that bright, yellow spark. Looks down at her own hands and thinks of Adam, and Xander, and Bridge, gone to another time.

“You have us, too,” says Dax, reaching over and squeezing her hand. “Three whole teams. How cool is that?”

Tori laughs again, this time less choked. A little more honest. “You’re right,” she says, and looks across at him, blue to blue. He’s wearing a bright blue shirt. She’s not. Still, he smiles and it feels realer than anything has in months. “Thank you.”

“Hey, you know what they say,” Mack says, lifting his hands with a wide smile. “Once a ranger…”

“Always a ranger,” the rest of his team echoes, and then Rose throws her fries at Will to stop him from stealing more and they all burst out laughing.

The sun is still shining but it’s not as humid anymore. Tori sits there surrounded by the Overdrive rangers and feels a deep warmth all the way through her bones that she hasn’t felt in a long, long time. So maybe this is it. Maybe this is all it really is.


End file.
